


i was just a bad dream

by mountainsounds



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 01:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2006166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountainsounds/pseuds/mountainsounds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She stuffs most of her clothes, a canteen of water, and some of her mom’s med supplies into a backpack. Then they go – towards nothing, probably.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i was just a bad dream

**Author's Note:**

> For reference: _grounders, walkers,_ and _flesh-eaters_ are all slang for zombies.

Everyone has an outbreak story, and Clarke’s is this: _I watched my father die. My mother left. I thought the world was burning._

She leaves Annapolis with her high school ex and the dorky adrenaline junkie who offers her a bottle of whiskey in K-Mart. Half the population is gone, the grocery stores have been ransacked, and when she returns with him to find Finn, she’s half-drunk and convinced Jasper could be of use.

She stuffs most of her clothes, a canteen of water, and some of her mom’s med supplies into a backpack. Then they go – towards nothing, probably. There’s a quarantine station in Baltimore that Clarke knows is probably just a hoax.

(It is. Most of residential Baltimore is infested with the walkers, so the three of them cover ground through the forest instead. Sometimes they run into houses to stock up on supplies. Sometimes they make camp up in the trees. Sometimes they go to bed with empty stomachs. Most of the time, Clarke thinks dying would be easier than this.)

And it goes from there.

 

-

 

They’re lounging one night, against Clarke’s better judgment, at an abandoned cabin that Finn found on a hunt. Jasper’s putting the embers of their fire to rest, and Finn sits beside her on the porch, knees knocking together, as she turns her dad’s gun in her hands. Over and over, she runs the metal under her fingers until it starts to look less like a weapon.

There’s a storm brewing. There are bags under her companions’ eyes where life used to be, and it eats Clarke alive, the idea that they have followed her into this fight. They’ve been at it for months, but at least they are still alive. She wonders if that’s something to be happy about.

Her thoughts are a constant scream, but they are not enough to distract her from the crunching of footsteps drawing nearer. Finn tenses beside her, hand grasping her knee, and suddenly the three of them – Musketeers, she thinks briefly – are up in a flash, weapons drawn, bristling.

The creatures that emerge from the trees are human, Clarke realizes, almost painfully. Her friends are visibly relaxing, but she doesn’t lower her gun. She owes it to Finn and Jasper to be cautious. The other survivors they’ve encountered – Murphy, Anya, even  _Charlotte_  – have lived on instinct – they’ve shot, murdered, and stolen, and not just from the walkers. Meanwhile, Clarke can’t stand watching others hurt. Finn is the Gandhi of human-zombie relations. Jasper is just downright squeamish. If there’s a God watching over them, Clarke thinks he must be laughing. 

( _Tragedy brings out the worst in people_ , Jasper had told her once,  _and so do guns, food rations, and flesh-eating zombies_. So no, she doesn’t have the time to get chummy with another gang like Murphy’s. She would go to gunfire sooner rather than later.)

She sees a man first, maybe in his early twenties, with streaks of blood across his nose and jaw. “Don’t come any closer.” Her voice is shriller than she intends.

“I saw the fire,” he breathes gruffly as he emerges into the clearing, casting his eyes over their little makeshift home. Clarke doesn’t know why, but she feels guilt bubble in her throat – for being so cautious, maybe, or for letting Finn confine her to this cabin in a little corner of their nightmare. “Wouldn’t happen to have any water, would you?”

The man moves to take another step forward, but Clarke shakes her head, inching closer to the fire pit that separates him from her and her friends. “Don’t even think about it.”

"Relax," he says, hand tightening around a gun in the waistband of his pants. "I'm a police officer." His voice is low, baritone, and his eyes dart around from Clarke to Finn to Jasper and back again. He's on edge. She can't imagine why.  
  
"Oh, because that'll help me relax," she grumbles. A soft click resonates in the air as Clarke turns the safety off her gun, and she hears Finn shift uncomfortably behind her. Her arms are growing sore. As the man inches forward again, the moonlight hits him, and Clarke can vaguely make out a police uniform.

"Officer Bellamy Blake, 9th precinct, Baltimore. You ever fired a gun before, princess?"  
  
“Why? You gonna arrest me?” Clarke raises her chin with defiance, eyes flashing dangerously at the stranger—at Bellamy. There’s a girl behind him, she notices, with the same bronzed skin and thick, dark hair, but his arm, splayed cautiously at his side, holds her back. She expects to see fear in the girl’s eyes, but it’s more…boredom. Complacence, almost. Clarke wonders if this has happened to them before, and how often Bellamy has the audacity to charge campsites in the dark of night.

Finn’s fingers brush her side. “Clarke —“

"Finn, don’t."

"You should listen to your boyfriend, princess. Put the gun down.” His voice is laced with disdain, the same tone she’s been dishing out at him.

The boyfriend remark sends a ripple of discomfort up Clarke’s spine. “Who’s the girl?” she asks, lips drawing back in a sneer. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jasper run his fingers through his wispy hair, readjusting the goggles on his forehead. He gives her a look, the one that says he’s not going all Finn on her but she should probably take it easy on these people, for her own sake. And he’s right. Old Clarke – pre-outbreak Clarke – would’ve welcomed these people into the cabin, given them food and water, and checked them for injuries. The girl doesn’t look any older than Clarke – nineteen at most. But her suspicions are high enough from experience and she half-expects one of them to whip out a knife and take her out with a simple throw.

“Octavia Blake,” the girl says then, stepping out from behind the man – Bellamy. He can only be her brother. Even in the dim light, Clarke sees an identical line of freckles dusted across Octavia’s nose. “We just need a place to stay for the night so our heads don’t get ripped off. We’ll be out of your hair by morning.”

Bellamy’s eyes still haven’t stopped searching her. Clarke sizes him up in return, though she clicks the safety back on and drops the handgun to her side. There’s a coldness in his stature that unsettles her – he stands rigidly, fingers brushing between his gun and the outline of the knife she can see in his pocket – but it’s his eyes that force her to nod. They’re softer and more fearful, pleading. They are eyes that say he’s been fighting for so long.

Finn sets a hand on her shoulder. "I've got first watch."

 

-

 

The Blakes spend the night and end up staying for months, even after the cabin has become a distant memory.

Jasper likes Octavia, and Clarke likes that Jasper likes Octavia, because the color returns to his cheeks somehow. Octavia may be a spitfire, but she lessens the testosterone overload and has a proclivity for recognizing useful plants and herbs. She’s also relatively easy to read, unlike her brother.

Clarke can’t figure out who the hell Bellamy is. (She knows Finn doesn’t trust him, but he doesn’t trust guns either, and Clarke’s pretty sure they, like Bellamy, have saved his life on numerous occasions.)

She never asks them to leave, for lack of better options.

 

-

 

“He’s not going to hurt you, Bellamy. Look – his legs are cut off, he can’t even walk. You don’t need to shoot him.”

The look that crosses his face must resemble something like shock mixed with disgust, because Clarke stares at him indignantly and Octavia, in the corner of his eye, is visibly pale.

“Listen to yourself, Clarke,” he says roughly, appalled and incredulous all in one gaze. “That – that is not a person, that is a shell of a person, and it –”

“He –”

“ _It_ ,” he growls, “needs to be put out of its misery.” He loads, locks, shoots, and there is a spray of flesh-eater insides on the sidewalk. “They’re already  _dead_ , and you’d do well to remember that, princess.” He stares blankly at the mess at his feet as Octavia rushes back in the house to help Jasper and Finn load up on supplies. He knows he’s right, but sometimes he can’t help but wonder if the girl beside him is too.

Clarke clears her throat. “I’m a shell of myself, too. You wanna shoot me? Officer?”

She stalks away.

 

-

 

It’s not that Bellamy and Octavia’s presence is an inconvenience, but it is.

Clarke minds, and Bellamy knows she minds, because there are more mouths to feed and more injuries to heal, more ammunition to waste and more people to miss when they’re gone.

Still, his dislike for the blonde dissipates with each passing day. They disagree on just about everything, from who should sleep where to the bodily processes of the walkers—(“They still have intestines, Bellamy, it’s basic human function.”)—but their head-butting has eroded into something electric. It may even resemble respect. She sways her counterparts, Finn and Jasper, with ease, conviction, and genuine care, and Bellamy often spends his down time watching her pace about, triple checking the water supply and muttering her priorities under her breath.

Clarke doesn’t sleep, often or at all, so when he’s on watch, sometimes she’ll join him. She tells him about their group before he arrived—about Raven, who they found outside the Baltimore quarantine, but was shot and paralyzed by another cluster of survivors. It’s part of the reason why Finn still refuses to use a gun. She worries about Jasper most of the time, too. He lost his best friend to the zombies before he met Clarke and Finn, and she thinks the kid’s name was Marty or something beginning with M, but it’s a mystery to all of them because he keeps it on lockdown. She even tells Bellamy about when she dated Finn freshman year of high school, but it seems too silly to think about in the scope of things.

He admires her, but he also thinks she’s naive to try and hold onto something so precious. They’re all fucked anyway.

 

-

 

(“Grounders,” he says, when she brings up the flesh-eaters, “Octavia and I call them grounders.”

“That’s dumb. They have no correlation to the ground.”  
  
“If you say so, princess.”

“They’re zombies. They want to eat you alive and the only way to kill them is to put a bullet in their brain.”

Bellamy scoffs. “We’re not in the middle of an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.”  
  
“No, just the apocalypse, Bellamy.” She pauses. “Raven used to call them walkers.” She holds her arms out like one of them and lumbers toward him, smacking him in the stomach in the process.

It’s so unlike her, such deviation from the serious, composed demeanor she fronts, that he cracks a grin. There’s nothing particularly pleasant about the creatures that rose from the dead, but she makes it – he doesn’t know – charming? “Grounders,” he says, before he picks up his rifle and heads to relieve Finn from his watch. The door clatters behind him.

 

-

 

Bellamy, she learns, is not intoxicated by near-death experiences.

“You’re okay. You’re okay – you’re okay – ” she whispers, and she’s holding him, fingers clamped in his damp hair and a hand grasping at his torn shirt. He curls into her, and his calloused hands are unnatural on her skin. Her body heat intensifies every time his knuckles brush against her. “You saved me, Bellamy. It almost got me and I – ”

Sometime, somewhere, one of them is sobbing, and she’s not entirely sure it’s not her, and he just keeps repeating  _I killed a person, I killed a person_. Sometimes it’s in his head, and sometimes it’s to Clarke, but it never eases the burden of transparent blood on his hands.

Her breathing is heavy, and for a minute she lets her heartbeat slow the adrenaline. She doesn’t want to become one of those undead friends Jasper cries about when he thinks everyone else is asleep.

“It was already dead,” she says quietly to Bellamy after a while. When they switched places on the scale of moral integrity, she doesn't know, but she feels like the catalyst to his fear. The anxiety continues to rise in her throat. Days ago, he had killed his fifty-somethingth grounder and today, he is thinking about a brainless body and whether it had ever been loved.

"It was already dead," she says again, maybe to herself this time. She is surprised to see droplets forming on his eyelashes, and even more surprised to find herself believing what she tells him.

 

-

 

In another world, he imagines he would hate Clarke, but the one they are in now - the nightmare he wakes up to - is full of monsters, and she refuses to let him become one.

 

-

 

Finn says nothing the next morning, which shouldn’t bother her, but it does. He has been Clarke's rock, her confidant – maybe more, she thinks to herself, when the pressing issue of flesh-eating zombies isn’t so ever present – but he remains distant now, and she lets him.

When Octavia grips her shoulder to wake her for breakfast, there is a silent thank you searching in her eyes. Clarke’s eyes instead burn (from smoke or tears, she can’t be sure) but she gathers her jacket and trudges the few feet to Jasper, who holds out a canteen of water for her.

Finn, still, says nothing, does nothing, is nothing. He is an activist, she knows; he doesn’t have to tell her twice. It’s not just death but murder, in his eyes, to put gun against grounder. Every time she agrees with Bellamy, every time she puts one down herself (six times, now), his disappointment grows and so does the distance.

But when she replays Bellamy’s rifle going off, she sees: he is choosing life. He is choosing Clarke’s life. And that is something Finn can never give her.

 

-

 

Clarke’s never heard Bellamy complain about target practice, but it's pouring down rain. Giving him a weapon is usually a stimulant – within moments, there's adrenaline coursing through his veins – but today, his hair is matted to his face, and each step sends him a little further into the mud. He looks more like a drowned puppy than the smirking, aloof, rifle-wielding zombie hunter she usually observes.

It's only their third time training in a month, so Clarke hasn't gotten much better, but she has little choice in the matter. The gunshots attract so much attention to the walkers that they can only ever fit a lesson in before they relocate and go on the move, to another city or towards the farmland or back into the suburbs.

“You’re still aiming too far to the left, Clarke,  _focus_ ,” Bellamy instructs her, a bit too impatiently for her tastes, pacing back and forth behind her as she fires a few rounds into a dummy fashioned from a tablecloth and an old sofa cushion.

“If the target actually had a shape, I might be able to hit it,” she grumbles.

He chuckles slightly at that, but manages to remain stoic. “How about we put Lover Boy up on the target, and see how well you can aim then?”

“You’re an ass,” she says.

“You’ll learn to enjoy it, princess.”

A silence falls between them, and she shoots again, but it’s too far to the left still, and the bullet ricochets off the tree behind the target and into the grass. Bellamy mutters something to himself and draws up behind her, waiting for her to aim. He hesitantly sets a hand on her shoulder, the other on her gun arm. 

Clarke lets his hands guide her, his breath on the back of her neck suddenly stirring something warm in the pit of her stomach. He moves her arm slightly back over to the right, and she pulls the trigger. It hits, and she lets out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

When they're gathering their belongings to head back to the rest of the group, she turns on him. “I get why you hate Finn, you know,” she says matter-of-factly, flipping the safety back on the gun. “He hates guns, you don’t. He’s a little self-righteous, you’re a little…well, self-destructive.” His eyebrows raise, but she doesn’t let the ball drop. “You also probably think the only reason he hasn’t left us is because he thinks he has to, or wants to, take care of me. Which is probably true. But..."

"What?"

“There’s a lot I’m still trying to figure out about you.” She sounds annoyed.

His lips twist into a smirk. “Like what?”

“Like why _you’re_ still here." Clarke doubts Jasper or Finn has followed them to this neck of the woods, but she lowers her voice to a murmur anyway. “We’re slowing you down. You know it, I know it.”

Bellamy’s eyebrows quirk, like he’s chewing on the thought. “Maybe I just like you guys.”

“Please, Bellamy. You don’t like anyone.”

“True.”

“Admit it. Admit that we slow you down.”

“Slow us down from what?" His eyes burn into her. They're supposed to be intimidating, she knows, but she meets them back with just the same ferocity. "Just in case you haven’t noticed, princess, there’s nowhere to go. It's all grounder territory out there."

“I don’t know, maybe you have family –”

“Well, we don’t,” he snaps.

She sighs and straps a bag of guns over her shoulder, starting on the path back to their campsite before she says something stupid like  _you have me_.

 

-

 

(Dying doesn’t seem so bad anymore. She dreams about it sometimes, about seeing white light and flying into the unknown. She even dreams about becoming one of the grounders. It must be nice to explore the world without a care – without the pain, anguish, and terror that comes with humanity.

“I would rather die than turn into one,” is Bellamy’s thought on the matter.

“Obviously. You think they’re monsters.”

“I just don’t think I’d want to Octavia to see me like that. Worrying, wondering about where I am, whether I still have traces of humanity left, whether I can be saved. Better to just get it over and done with, right?”

Clarke doesn’t say anything. She tries to understand, but his love for Octavia will always trump her desire to protect Finn and Jasper. _Survival_ has been melded across her forehead, not _give me a sec and I could die for you right here._

He lowers his voice with an air of self-condolence, but she strains to listen anyway. “When you have someone you really care about, you have to do what’s best for them.”)

 

-

 

"Take off your shirt," she demands, head pounding in her skull, rattling to an abominable degree. Clarke looks down to a pair of shaky hands, and squeezes her eyes shut to help quell the nerves. She's only ever watched her mother sew stitches, and she's never had to patch her own clothing, either – not that she'd tell Bellamy regardless, but it seems irresponsible with his life hanging in the balance.

Bellamy smirks as he grabs his shirt by the collar and yanks it over his head. "So pushy." The removal of fabric reveals a layer of lean, tan muscle that Clarke certainly registers but barely has time to admire.

“You’re positive it didn’t bite you?”

“Well, I haven’t started drooling yet, princess.”

She runs her fingers along the deep gash in his abdomen. It's oozing blood, but not enough to have punctured any vital organs (or so she hopes). A sigh of relief escapes her lips, and she, without thought, leans forward to press her forehead to his shoulder.

Bellamy's eyes linger on her, but they lack the aggressive guise that she's grown used to. He winces slightly as she probes at and sterilizes the wound, but doesn't say a word. She's glad; her heart is still palpitating in her chest, either from the thought of losing him, or from his close proximity.

"Don't do it again."

"Do what?" His voice is soft, but she can practically hear the smirk as she threads another row of stitches through the gash.

"Almost die." She avoids his eyes. “You’re on strike two.”

"I'll try not to make it a habit.” Clarke knots the thread and cuts the rest loose. After they’d used her mother’s supplies, she’d stolen the suture kit from a clinic they had ransacked on the way out of Baltimore. It’s another reminder of their sad predicament, and she catches herself wishing for just a moment that she could have met Bellamy under different circumstances. When she looks up again, he’s speaking. “—and we don't have a lot of medical supplies left for you, anyway. We should see if Jasper thinks a run to town would be—"

"That's not what I meant, Bellamy." She moves up to stitch a cut across his cheekbone and rolls her eyes. Of course he thinks she’s worried about medicine and not his life.

"What do you mean?" He tries to turn and look at her, but she pushes his chin away so she can get better access to the face wound.

"I mean don't almost die. If you're gonna die, go the full nine yards. If you're not, don't –don't shoot at zombies – grounders – with your dumbass, loud assault rifles and don't try to protect me when I don't need saving and don't –"

"Almost die, I got it." His eyes crinkle at the sides, even though he's not smiling, and –

Clarke grabs his shirt in her fist and yanks his lips down to hers. He tastes like blood and the forest and smells like campfire, and he's everything until he's nothing and their foreheads are only brushing. It’s her way of saying  _thank you; I could love you if I tried_. "Just don't die at all," she whispers, a ghost of a smile on her lips. His eyes are still clamped shut, so she studies the curve of his jaw and his fluttering, long, dark eyelashes as she kisses them. No, he can't die. He won't.

 

-

 

They don’t speak of the kiss very often, but sometimes, when Octavia and Jasper fall asleep on one another, and Finn seems far away, keeping his dutiful guard post, Clarke longs to touch Bellamy, to feel his warm skin against hers again. She is growing mad with the desire for human closeness. She doesn't need anything from him, really, but to lie next to him would be – well, it would be nice.

They set up camp in a house this time, in a residential area that is far less populated by walkers than usual. Clarke tries to martyr herself into sleeping on the couch instead of a real bed, since they're one short, and Bellamy almost lets her. (Almost.)

"I told you I can take the couch, princess," he sighs when he sees her stretched out on the ripped, crimson cushions, a blanket snug around her small frame. Exasperated as he is, he's fought harder fights as of late, and she knows that if she pushes him, he'll just head upstairs.

She wonders when he’d begun to call her princess without condescension.

He wonders why she can't be more like Octavia, and dash upstairs within seconds to call dibs on the largest mattress in the house.

"There's another bed on the second floor. You can sleep there," she tells him, a fake politeness to her tone.

"Clarke."

"If you're gonna sleep down here, you can sleep down here, but I am too."

"Is this some clever way of getting me into bed with you?"

"This isn't a bed," she points out, "it's a couch. And it has mothballs."

"A princess deserves a night's rest in a real bed."

She pushes herself up into a sitting position, and there is color in her cheeks, the earliest sign of her irritation. “Good thing I value your opinion on the matter. Now, are you just going to just stand there and read me my Miranda rights, or are you going to give it up and come over here?” she snaps.

He climbs onto the sofa beside her with a sigh and a look that says  _I’d follow you anywhere_   _if you let me_. He is hesitant to touch her, at first, but every night he reminds himself it could be the last and so when she moves to sink into him, he gives in. She tucks her head under his chin and wraps the blanket over the both of them. It's quiet.

Bellamy wants to say something meaningful, to tell her that she saves him, and not just from the grounders. He is drowning and she pulls him up for air. But instead, she grumbles, “keep your hands where I can see them, officer,” into his shoulder, and he kisses her fiercely. He searches for her with his lips and teeth and tongue until he’s forgotten everything he wants to say in the first place. 

He’s never been very good with words.

She wakes up in the fucking upstairs bedroom, but he's beside her, so that has to count for something.

 

-

 

It’s their first grounder-walker- _zombie_ encounter in weeks, and the air is filled with Octavia’s high-pitched screams. Clarke is shooting bullets into brains and stabbing blindly with her knife to what feels like no avail. There are maybe ten or so surrounding their group of five, in a car park of all places, all because Finn wanted Jasper to hot-wire some beat-up SUV.

There’s a walker behind her and another under the car, and she shoots at them both, hoping a bullet doesn’t ricochet off the car and hit Jasper in the kneecap.

There is a burst of unbridled pain in the back of her left calf, but she continues reloading her gun. She locks, loads, shoots – or is it load, then lock, then shoot? Either way, she’s getting the job done. Clarke’s feet slam against the pavement as she blows the head off one of the zombies converging on Finn near the elevator (out of service, probably). She turns to look for Bellamy.

He’s good. He’ll always be good. He’s fighting next to Octavia, which isn’t a surprise given his protective instincts, though she holds her own pretty well, especially taking into account the crossbow she’s using as a weapon. She’s stringing arrows this way and that, and Bellamy’s reloading his rifle, and Clarke realizes that this is about how ‘family’ it gets down here.

“Clarke – Clarke, I think one of them got you,” she hears Finn’s breath in her ear, but there are more walkers lumbering up the ramp towards them, so she holds the pain in by stiffening her jaw, and fires a few shots into the gaggle of newcomers. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows Finn’s right, but she can’t stop thinking of Bellamy and how he’d rather die and let Octavia move on than be trapped in this nightmare.

“Shut up and shoot, Finn.”

“I GOT IT!” Jasper’s voice echoes throughout the underground structure, and there’s the hum of an engine whirring. How he’s accomplished this by sticking two wires together, she has no idea, but she prays that there is gas in the tank, and that maybe her vision will stop spinning. She can’t differentiate the trigger from the rest of the gun anymore, so she drops it to the ground and pulls the knife out of her back pocket.

Suddenly, there’s nothing under her feet, and it could be death coming for her (she catches herself excited at the thought), but whatever is enveloping her is both soft and strong. They must be arms, she figures, as a car door slams. When she tries to open her eyes she can see unruly curls. Long hair brushes her face, probably Octavia’s.

They must have escaped. Her heart fills at the thought. They’re safe.

She still can’t see well, but her hearing is going back to normal. It’s sharper than usual, even. She senses the humming of the car engine, and Jasper’s fingers tapping the steering wheel, and Octavia’s voice registers.

“Bell – Bell, her eyes are turning white.”

Something akin to rain is falling onto her skin, and Clarke tries to speak, tries to tell Bellamy that she hopes he’s okay and she probably loves him. Someone’s yelling now – it has to be him, she thinks, remembering how his anger used to be reserved for only her, and she wants to tell him that it’s no one’s fault but her own.

He screams obscenities at Finn and then she’s breathing heavier and her throat is dry but salivating, and she’s pushing- pushing the knife into his hand as she hisses, “do it, Bellamy.”

So he does.

It’s been coming for her a long time now, and Clarke is ready to see her dad again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> my life has been reduced to bellarke fanvids and angsty alternative music~~~ this probably makes no sense so i commend you if you made it all the way through my 4am gibberish! comments, reviews, etc. are lovely and much appreciated x


End file.
